Monday, 21 February 2011

The following review by Federico Caprotti of The Politics of the Piazza appeared in the journal Space and Polity Volume 14 Number 2 2010 pages 209-210Eamonn Canniffe (2008) The Politics of the Piazza: The History and Meaning of the Italian Square (Ashgate: Aldershot), pp. 288, ISBN 978-0-7546-4716-4, £40.00.

Public space has always been fluid in the Italian city. Public and private spheres intermingle and intersect in myriad ways in the cities of the peninsula, from the narrow, conspiratorial calle of Venice which open up into wide, sudden piazze, to the regenerated landscapes of concrete and steel in Milan's new urban quarters. The piazza is a feature which has remained central to the articulation of public life in Italy throughout the past two millennia; it, too, has undergone transformations in form, function, and meaning. From Roman fora to the spaces used by political movements such as the girotondini in the 2000s, the piazza is deeply rooted within Italy's material and political consciousness. In The Politics of the Piazza, Eamonn Canniffe does a good job of tracing the development and transformations of urban space which have resulted in the spatially, culturally and politically multi-layered urban spaces we witness today in the Italian city.

Canniffe takes the reader on a detailed journey through time, taking the Roman period as a starting point, and ending with the piazzas of today, with their advertising hoardings, art walls, and virtual technologies. Overall, the book tries to show that in the transformation of the spaces of the piazza, 'shifts between autocratic and democratic forms of government employ subtly nuanced spatial and iconographic languages to form the self-image of the polis and project an ideology onto a wider world' (p.1).The book is articulated in four sections, comprising 14 chapters. The first section's three chapters trace the roots of Italian urban form, from Roman times, through early Christianity, and on to the Middle Ages. In the first chapter, for example, Canniffe teases out the complex, multiple urban accretions in Rome's forum, an urban space which developed in several variations over many centuries. The chapter posits a well-defined contrast between the transformed Roman forum and that of Pompeii, seen as a snapshot, frozen in ash in A.D. 79, or that of Brixia (modern-day Brescia), first excavated in the 1820s during a period of Austrian occupation.

This is followed, in the second chapter, by a fascinating analysis of the changing urban imaginary introduced by Christianity. With the waning of the Roman empire, new centres of urban public life arose within existing cities. Canniffe argues that one of the main changes to take place was the shift in urban focus to Christian sites, previously relegated to the urban periphery: the ‘paradigm which provided the model for emulation’ (p.38) was no longer Rome, but Jerusalem. In Rome itself, a ‘new holy city was created out of the carcass of ancient urban practices’ (p.39). Indeed, new Christian buildings were sometimes radically different from what had existed before, for example in the promotion of collective worship in churches: the distinction between religious and public spaces thus became less porous. Overall, the chapter convincingly argues that the public spaces of later medieval piazze can be found in embryonic form in these spaces of juncture between Christian religious buildings and the street, where believers gathered before ceremonies. This is exemplified by cases such as the Lateran; however, Canniffe also uses examples from other imperial cities, such as the basilica of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan.

The early modern city forms the focus of the second section of the book, which takes the reader from the early and high Renaissance (Rinascimento would have better served the book’s purpose), to mannerism and the baroque. The fifth chapter, in particular, is a highly enjoyable study of urban space in the high Renaissance, focusing on the role of Bramante in Vigevano, but also on exemplary cases from Rome and Venice. The third section then moves on to considering the piazza and urban space during the formation of an Italian national consciousness, from neo-classicism, to the Risorgimento – Italy’s struggle for national unity – and the use of urban space, planning and architecture during the fascist era. In the tenth chapter, Canniffe deals with the thorny issue of fascism’s considerable impact on Italian urban space, and presents insightful analyses of key spaces such as Moretti’s Piazzale dell’Impero (incorrectly referred to as Piazzale del Impero throughout the book), in Rome. However, the author gets carried away arguing about the links between anthropocentrism, fascism and urban space in the Piazzale dell’Impero, stating that ‘an anthropomorphic reading of the space would feature the circular fountain as the head, with the central platform as the spine, the monolithic inscribed blocks as the ribs, and the obelisk as the penis’ (pp.200-201). As imaginative as fascist architects and planners could be, this reviewer thinks that they were probably not that imaginative.

The books’s fourth section is exciting, in that it moves into the contemporary era, considering neo-realist urbanism, Aldo Rossi’s influence on neo-rationalism, and the city of the Anni di Piombo (the ‘Years of Lead’). The Politics of the Piazza ends by delving into the still-changing role of the piazza and its intermeshing with the ‘politics of the present’ in an era in which political struggle and the commercialisation of urban space go hand in hand.

Canniffe's writing style makes the oft-complicated layering of meanings, buildings and spaces in the piazze he analyses easy to understand and follow. The book could easily have focused on Italy's 'main' urban centres as sources of examples; however, Canniffe also traces the development of the piazza through other centres too, notably smaller towns such as Brescia, or even smaller settlements such as Torcello, in the Venetian lagoon. However, the book is marred, in places, by inaccuracies in editing. For example, in the discussion of the reuse of amphitheatres in Lucca (p.34), the author refers the reader to an illustration of this example; however, the illustration which Canniffe points to is located in the following chapter, and does not show the impact of Lucca’s elliptical amphitheatre, but the space facing the basilica of San Lorenzo Maggiore in Milan. Likewise, Novocento (p.186) should be Novecento; and political parties’ names should be capitalised (p.253). Notwithstanding these minor inaccuracies, the book is a good read and will be an ideal addition to any collection focusing on the politics of urban spaces, urban culture, and history. The richness of use of visual materials is another positive feature: the book is illustrated with numerous black and white photographs, as well as plans and diagrams. Finally, The Politics of the Piazza is well-referenced, without getting bogged down in distracting debates and literatures: the focus here is always on the slippery subject at hand, the piazza in all its manifestations.

Since the end of Apartheid, there has been a new orientation in South African art and design, turning away from the colonial aesthetics to new types of African expression. This book examines some of the fascinating and impressive works of contemporary public architecture that 'concretise' imaginative dialogues with African landscapes, craft and indigenous traditions.

Referring to Frantz Fanon's classic study of colonised subjectivity, 'Black Skin, White Masks', Noble contends that Fanon's metaphors of mask and skin are suggestive for architectural criticism, in the context of post-Apartheid public design.

Taking South Africa's first democratic election of 1994 as its starting point, the book focuses on projects that were won in architectural competitions. Such competitions are conceived within ideological debates and studying them allows for an examination of the interrelationships between architecture, politics and culture. The book offers insights into these debates through interviews with key parties concerned - architects, competition jurors, politicians, council and city officials, artists and crafters, as well as people who are involved in the day-to-day life of the buildings in question.

Dr. Jonathan Alfred Noble is a lecturer at The University of the Witwatersrand

The first volume of Peter Blundell Jones's Modern Architecture Through Case Studies looked mainly at pre-war buildings, including unquestionably canonical works like the Bauhaus, the Villa Savoye and the Casa del Fascio. But it also included four post-war buildings, the latest of which was Kahn's Kimbell Museum of 1972, so the chronological subtitle of this second volume is rather puzzling.

The new book is puzzling in other respects too. This time Eamonn Canniffe has contributed about half of the studies, even though the two authors, to quote from the introduction, 'hold different ideological positions, would not have included the same examples if working alone and do not always agree in [their] judgements'. This might account for a certain lack of focus in the book as a whole. You begin to wonder who and what it is for, exactly. Perhaps it is trying to extend the canon, rejecting many obvious mainstream examples (no late Corb) and including some downright obscure buildings, such as the Chapel at Dachau by Helmut Striffler and the Waisenhaus in Eichstatt by Karljosef Schattner. But it also includes some over-familiar buildings like the Centre Pompidou and Foster's Willis Faber Dumas in Ipswich. Or perhaps there is some hidden theme, something of particular relevance to architecture now. If so it is very well hidden indeed. What could Carlo Scarpa's Castelvecchio Museum possibly have in common with Aldo van Eyck's Orphanage in Amsterdam, or Eisenman's Wexner Center with the Smithsons' Economist Building?

It doesn't really add up, but it's a rewarding read nevertheless, and a useful reference work. The case-study approach has limitations, but 4000 words devoted to each building allows for an unusual depth of scholarship. In order to understand a piece of architecture it is important to look at it closely and know something about the circumstances of its creation. One cannot, for example, fully understand the relationship between the Leicester Engineering Block and the Stuttgart. Staatsgalerie without knowing something about the internal politics of James Stirling's office, and Venturi's Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery would be an enigma without a knowledge of the influence of the Prince of Wales. So this is a book worth reading for its own sake, as history. Its core readership will be students and they will learn a lot from it, but it might be hard to interest them in what they will surely see as a collection of deeply unfashionable buildings.

For all its faults the purpose of the book was to write a history that did not follow the usual path of excluding anything that fails to fit within some determinist model of inevitable progress. It seems on reflection to mark a phase of rapid development, disappointment and confusion and therefore might be thought of as timely. And those last three words of the review I wear with particular pride.

Wednesday, 2 February 2011

This phrase from Shelley's Adonais is a route into the concept of Rome as a palimpsest, more evocative in its four overlapping terms than Freud's famous image which compares the city to the human mind 'an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.' Shelley's words suggest the different ways , surely many more than merely four, in which the physical fabric of the city might be read, above all the city which remains a fundamental locus of European culture.

The pattern which can be read in its monuments, as forensic clues in some vast site of investigation, tie events across time to provide the matrix through which urban representation occurs. My paper will explore the city through the narratives which have animated its spaces in fact and fiction, or in the grey zone which includes both those realities. Rome as image of the city is as pervasive as the image of Rome, and therefore the readings of Rome stand proxy for many of the manifestations of the contemporary urban condition.

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Eamonn Canniffe leads the Architecture Research Centre and the MA in Architecture + Urbanism at the Manchester School of Architecture. He was educated in Architecture at Cambridge and Harvard Universities. In 1996 he held a Rome Scholarship in the Fine Arts at the British School at Rome. Between 1986 and 1998 he taught at the University of Manchester School of Architecture, and between 1998 and 2006 at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture. He is the author of Urban Ethic: Design in the Contemporary City (Routledge 2006) (Chinese edition 城市伦理--当代城市设计 2013) and The Politics of the Piazza: the history and meaning of the Italian square (Ashgate 2008). He is co-author (with Tom Jefferies) of Manchester Architecture Guide (1999) and (with Peter Blundell Jones) of Modern Architecture through Case Studies 1945-1990 (Architectural Press 2007), (Chinese edition 现代建筑的演变 1945--1990年 2009) (Spanish edition Modelos de la Arquitectura Moderna -Volumen II 1945-1990 2013). For a number of years he has served as Architecture Series Editor for Ashgate Publishing.